US press: The challenges of an aging President

Photo: The New York Times

Because of his age and his determination to run for a second term, President Biden is taking the American public into uncharted waters. He is the oldest person ever to serve as president, is the oldest ever to run for re-election and, if he is successful, would be 86 at the end of his tenure. Ronald Reagan, by comparison, was an unprecedented 77 when he ended his second term in 1989, writes ‘The New York Times’ at an Opinion of the Editorial Board.

A remarkably broad swath of the American public — both Mr. Biden’s supporters and his detractors — have expressed increasing doubts about his ability to serve for another five years because of his age. As Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, noted, “In Times/Siena polling last fall, more than 70 percent of battleground state voters agreed with the statement that Mr. Biden’s ‘just too old to be an effective president.’” But the release of the special counsel Robert K. Hur’s report on Thursday — and Mr. Hur’s assessment that the president presents himself as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” — will invariably test the trust that the American people have in their president.

He must do better — the stakes in this presidential election are too high for Mr. Biden to hope that he can skate through a campaign with the help of teleprompters and aides and somehow defeat as manifestly unfit an opponent as Donald Trump, who has a very real chance of retaking the White House.

Mr. Biden’s allies are already going to the usual Washington playbook of dismissing the special counsel’s report as partisan. Regardless of Mr. Hur’s motivation, the details that he presented spoke to worries voters already had. The president has to reassure and build confidence with the public by doing things that he has so far been unwilling to do convincingly.

This is a dark moment for Mr. Biden’s presidency, when many voters are relying on him to provide the country with a compelling alternative to the unique danger of Mr. Trump.

When the CNN White House correspondent M.J. Lee asked about age concerns, Biden snapped: “That is your judgment. That is your judgment.” But 71 percent of battleground state voters in one of our polls said Biden is “too old to be an effective president.”

Pushing back at the image of a crotchety grandpa, he came across like a crotchety grandpa. “I’m well-meaning and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing,” he barked, notes ‘The New York Times’.

Asked why he insists he is the only Democrat who can defeat Trump, Biden shot back: “Because I am the most qualified person in this country to be president of the United States and finish the job I started.”

That sounded disturbingly like Donald Trump claiming, “I alone can fix it.”

Biden refused to take the one-term win, bow out and make room for new blood. So now he has to go to war with Trump and stop him from getting back into the Oval for his grotesque revenge rampage.

But, in a world on fire, with Republicans in Congress spiraling into farce, the Biden crew clearly has no plan for how to deal with the president’s age except to shield him and hide him and browbeat reporters who point out that his mental state — like the delusional Trump’s — is a genuine issue.

Biden is not just in a bubble — he’s in bubble wrap. Cosseting and closeting Uncle Joe all the way to the end — eschewing town halls and the Super Bowl interview — are just not going to work. Going on defense, when Trump is on offense, is not going to work.

President Joe Biden must step down for the sake of our country. He cannot handle the pressures of the presidency at his advanced age and is doing the country harm. Joe Biden is America’s Konstantin Chernenko, ‘The National Interest’ stresses.

A drab, stern man by bearing, Chernenko was 72 years-old when he was “eased” into the top spot in the Soviet Union in 1984 after succeeding Yuri Andropov (who died in office). Chernenko was terminally ill with an array of maladies and was widely viewed by the Soviet elite as a figurehead or merely a placeholder until they could find someone better to succeed him.

Just 33 years later, the United States appears as the USSR did in the 1980s. President Joe Biden is running for reelection at the age of 81 years. That’s nine years older than Konstantin Chernenko was when he became leader of the Soviet Union.

And while Mr. Biden is not riddled with a terminal disease, most Americans — 75 percent, according to a recent CNN poll — do not think that President Biden has the “stamina and mental sharpness” to be president anymore. In fact, concerns about Biden’s possible age-related mental decline have dogged the forty-sixth president since he ran for the presidency four years ago. As he has aged while in office, and the longer he has been president, these concerns have only grown.

Joe Biden has a paltry 38.5 percent approval rating as president. He’s losing Latino voters to the former president, Donald J. Trump, who is again running for the White House.

Last April, shortly after Biden announced his intentions to run for reelection, the New York Post analyzed his public schedule and determined that President Biden was only working 30 hours a week — five hours less than France’s notoriously short work week.

As this situation persists, the United States falls apart internally while its vicious foreign rivals — China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and others — pick the American position as global leader apart.

In the last week along, Joe Biden has bumbled several press appearances and has only reinforced the image that he’s ‘America’s Chernenko’. These displays will only worsen over time. That is why President Biden must step down for the sake of our country. He simply cannot handle the pressures of the presidency at his advanced age. And if he won’t step down then, if there is a patriot among his cabinet, the twenty-fifth amendment must be invoked and Biden must be removed from office so that someone more able can succeed him.

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